"Someday, we will all have a gotdamned "appreciate" button on our whatever-comes-next-after-websites-and-social-media-profiles, and micropayments will flow like milk and honey." - Marianne http://friendfeed.com/lsw...

And each and every post we make on that forum has a little gold coin underneath our avatars that links directly to our own personal donate page, where you can donate amounts as small as a penny. So now, if we want to give someone on the forum a penny for their thoughts, or butt in with our two cents, we can...literally. Or we can be much more generous, if we want.
- April Russo

I guess what I am trying to say is that we don't really have to wait for "someday" for some entrepreneur with access to a ton of VC cash to make our dreams come true, and exploit us for profit at the same time. Where there is a will, there is a way for us to build it ourselves...today! And we can keep it pure, no exploitation for profit, automatically taking only a small amount from each user's deposits and placing it into a fund, just enough to keep the site going and pay its bills.
- April Russo

"About The Locker Project A Locker is a container for personal data, which gives the owner the ability to control how it's protected and shared. It retrieves and consolidates data from multiple sources, to create a single collection of the things you see and do online: the photos you take, the places you visit, the links you share, contact details for the people you communicate with, and much more. It also provides flexible APIs for developers to build rich applications with access to all of this information. Our Vision As we go through our lives we create vast amounts of data. Emails, phone calls, social network posts, photos, utility bills, health monitoring devices, text messages, browsing data, purchase receipts and more are all born out of the regular course of our actions. It's more than just data. It represents our actions, interests, intentions, communications, relationships, locations, behaviors and creative and consumptive efforts. Currently, our data is scattered...
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- April Russo
from Bookmarklet

Has anyone heard anything about this before? This is being billed by some as an open source, decentralized, (soon to be) P2P powered, friendfeed-like desktop application, that puts you in control of your data, rather than some big company that wants to exploit it. Being on Windows at the moment, I can't really experiment and mess around with this to see what it's all about. I wish I could, though. It sounds interesting.
- April Russo

"Migrating your web application from a single node to a distributed setup is always a deceivingly large architectural change. You may need to do it due to a resource constraint of a single machine, for better availability, to decouple components, or for a variety of other reasons. Under this new architecture, each node is on its own, and a network link is present to piece it all back together. So far so good, in fact, ideally we would also like for our new architecture to provide a few key properties: Consistency (no data conflicts), Availability (no single point of failure), and Partition tolerance (maintain availability and consistency in light of network problems)."
- imabonehead
from Bookmarklet

"Here is a simple example of a Websocket + Tornado + Redis Pub/Sub protocol interaction. The principle is very simple: when your user loads the page, she is automatically added to a list of “listeners”. An independent thread is running: it listens for messages from Redis with the subscribe command, and send a message through Websocket to every registered ”listener”. In this example, the user can send a message to herself with a simple AJAX-powered form, which calls a view with a payload (the message), and the view publish it via the publish command of Redis."
- imabonehead
from Bookmarklet

"So I'm giving Cliqset a real go this weekend. I can see this can easily be a replacement (if we ever need one) to FriendFeed. It's the most natural replacement to my favourite service. So why don't I use it? Because no one else does. But things might be changing, for one the Google Buzz commenting syncing is a massive new feature and now allows me to use Cliqset as my Google Buzz client (well kinda, if the people you can following on Buzz are not on Cliqset then it, of course, doesn't work." - You can find me here btw: http://cliqset.com/koltreg...
- Kol Tregaskes
from Bookmarklet

Yep, and Darren is easy to talk to and will take in your comments and fix problems there and then.
- Kol Tregaskes

I'm sure this is very straightforward but how do you search on Cliqset? Becoming more important since FriendFeed's search seems, putting it kindly, to be on life support. Edit: Panic over, found it. Edit2: Search sucks compared to FriendFeed.
- JSLeFanu

"Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen quite a few social networks come and go. The ones that have stayed strong (Twitterand Facebook, primarily) have done so because they focus primarily on a couple of things and doing them extremely well. miio is hoping to capitalize on the simplicity of Twitter, while expanding into features of Facebook and even FriendFeed. So far, I really like what I see because it appears to be built from the ground up to be a centralized place that you can use feed to Twitter or any site that will accept incoming RSS."
- Kol Tregaskes
from Bookmarklet

1. ...... that there was a app like Ping.fm that allowed me to share posts like I can to Buzz and FriendFeed. Posts with excrepts, images, links and media. Ping.fm is for status updates.
- Kol Tregaskes

What I wish is that you could bookmarklet an article with it and have it post to my services. The main services I'm interesting in are FriendFeed, Google Buzz, Facebook (though can easily live without this), Twitter (so would have to be a shortened Twitter-formatted version with a bit.ly link) and possibly Pip.io, Posterous and the new Amplify.
- Kol Tregaskes

I'd like to share the posts I share on FF and Buzz from a central place but formatted to tailor the different services. I have one way to share to FF, another way for Buzz, etc. Amplify is the closest service but, so far, does not post any media. This would work together with point 2.
- Kol Tregaskes

2. ...that there was a central place to read comments on posts from all my favourite services, like FriendFeed, Google Buzz, Posterous, Facebook, Twitter, Amplify and Pip.io. A self-hosted blog-type place perhaps?
- Kol Tregaskes

Overall I like the FF bookmarklet, you highlight the text you want to share, hit the bookmarklet and it auto-populates the title, the link and highlighted text (to the comment box). You can click up to 3 images to share too. Then post and it CCs to Twitter with e shortened link.
- Kol Tregaskes

I like how Posterous picks up the various formats of the page you want to share (though generally not the one you want) and you can cycle through each one. But its fiddly unless you get into the HTML.
- Kol Tregaskes

Amplify has a great clipping feature. You hit the bookmarklet, select to clip the page then the orange box appears over paragraphs and images and you select what you want to share then post. Easy as.
- Kol Tregaskes

"Deploying, running and monitoring application on a big cluster is a challenging task. Recently Hazelcast team deployed a demo application on Amazon EC2 platform to show how Hazelcast p2p cluster scales and screen recorded the entire process from deployment to monitoring. Hazelcast is open source (Apache License), transactional, distributed caching solution for Java. It is a little more than a cache though as it provides distributed implementation of map, multimap, queue, topic, lock and executor service."
- imabonehead
from Bookmarklet

"I’ve been somewhat following the whole Facebook privacy debacle over the last few weeks with some interest. The very passioned outcry I’ve seen from so many is something I didn’t expect. I agree that any social network that offer layers of both public and private sharing needs to adhere to some basic principles. They need to be very clear about what information is public and make it very simple for people to adjust their privacy settings. For the most part I think sites have done a decent job of this and the reason Facebook has been criticized is because it started as a defacto private network that slowly, and in many people’s minds sneakily, opted its users to being public. You need a giant infographic nowadays to help navigate your way through the current privacy settings. I did come across this great new tool you can use to check and reclaim your privacy settings."
- Kol Tregaskes
from Bookmarklet

Diaspora seems to be getting a lot of attention. What do the OpenFF guys think of this?
- Kol Tregaskes

It amuses me when people make calls like this. "Open" and "federated"? All web services/apps need $ to run. The money has to come from somewhere. This requires a business plan. The most important product a social network has to sell is its users. The status quo with Facebook is just a natural consequence of all of this.
- LANjackal

LANjackal, if what you say was true, there would be no AGPL web services out there. But there are...
- Marcos Marado
from fftogo

LANjackal: Any web service can be funded by a variety of income sources. The servers can be operated by individuals, organizations, businesses, government agencies, non-profit groups, and even families. If the software is kept secret then each potential host has to start their own server from scratch.
- Mike Chelen

Laconica has 85% of the needed functionality. Big additional code would be feed-scraping and clustering feeds for accounts. Building from the ground up is a big waste of time and effort. Also, as the Laconica creator and lead dev, I can commit to providing resources to make this project work.
- Evan Prodromou

Evan, how had you imagined building "plugins" for Laconia? Do you simply mean putting the "load" on the client? Indeed, a laconica and or Twitter client could add lots on top of the respective notification services to provide a FriendFeed-like experience. http://a.tinythread.com/ is a good example of this IMO. The threaded comments there look pretty friendfeed-ish imo.
- Meryn Stol

Laconica has a server-side plugin architecture already. 3rd-party code can "hook" important events in the main code and enhance or replace the default processing for those events, firing either before or after the events occur. There are hookpoints in the code for UI events (showing the header, showing the sidebar, etc.) database and domain object events (saving a new status, saving a...
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- Evan Prodromou

Evan, I do not have any experience with Laconica. Does it already support threaded conversations? That would be a start.
- Meryn Stol

@Meryn also, you may want to check out our threaded conversation pages like http://identi.ca/convers... . It's hierarchical, not flat like FF's, and it's based off the same @-reply mechanism that Twitter uses. But it could be customized to work more like Jaiku or Friendfeed (where comments are distinct from other notices.)
- Evan Prodromou

@evan, while I've got you 'on the line', I'd sure appreciate any feedback on my userscript for language translation - I'm close to finishing an adaptation for identi.ca, but at the moment you can test out the twitter port: http://translatorize.com/ Thanks! - http://identi.ca/micah
- Micah

Matthew DeVries, no, SMS is not the core of the service. That would be crack-addled.
- Evan Prodromou

Matthew DeVries: w/r/t 10K of text: not sure I understand what you mean. 10K for each notice? 10K total? What point are you trying to make?
- Evan Prodromou

Sure seems like there is overlap between laconica and openff goals. Plugins could be a great way to fill any laconica gaps towards a Friendfeed like feature set
- Jason Wehmhoener
from iPhone

The Twitter ecosystem is showing sure signs of producing equal capabilities as FriendFeed (except for update speed - that's limited by the speed of the Twitter API), so I think that will eventually happen to Laconica too. If not, then I see not much future for Laconia anyway. Social media will not stop at 140 char microblogging. The future for Twitter - if any - is being a hub in something much bigger, something even more advanced than FriendFeed.
- Meryn Stol

At the moment, I have big doubts though if even Twitter will survive. Other ways to do push notification (e.g. pubsubhubbub) pose a big threat. I'm talking long-term of course. But that doesn't make either Laconica or Twitter seem attractive for me as a developer to put time in. I'd rather invest in technologies which seem to have a bright future ahead.
- Meryn Stol

@Matthew Devries, 0.8.x versions and below limited to 140 chars/notice. 0.9.x and above will support variable-length notices, from 1 to unlimited. We'll use truncation to deal with channels (like Twitter or SMS) that are space-constrained.
- Evan Prodromou

Interesting idea, Evan Prodromou. Does Laconi.ca support real time through the web interface?
- Vezquex

@Raphael yes it does. We support three different real-time update servers: Cometd (using Bayeux), Orbited, and Meteor. We'll probably have a Strophe-based XMPP update at some point in the near future. BTW, that's all implemented with plugins.
- Evan Prodromou

@Meryn Laconica supports a distributed protocol, OpenMicroBlogging, for a federated approach. We also have plugins in progress for RSSCloud, PubSubHubBub, XMPP PubSub, and FETHR.
- Evan Prodromou

You may have something here. I'll take a look at the documentation.
- Vezquex

I think comments as separate from notices is a big difference. Does Laconica do groups or lists?
- Kevin L

Evan: What I mean is that anything evolved out of microblogging probably won't matter much for the future of the web and social media. I think the future belongs to completely standardized hubs, using the pubsubhubbub protocol or a protocol yet to be invented. I simply don't think microblogging will survive as a core technology. I think it will prove too limited by its past.
- Meryn Stol

Meryn, the "micro" part is a gimmick. Once you lift the character limit, there should be no problem.
- Vezquex

I don't see much reasons to have laconia hubs when there are "standardized" hubs, willing to route around anything inside an Atom feed. Why register for a particular when people can get push updates from across the web? All a user has to do in the future is produce an atom feed. The hubs will be invisible to the user. They only see their app, a kind of Wordpress or something.
- Meryn Stol

BTW This is one of the reasons why I also probably won't be contributing to the OpenFF server clone. I don't think it has much future. I think we can already see the end of the road for centralized services. I still am interested in writing a client which can talk to all different (either centralized or federated) services out there... From a user's standpoint, broad compatibility with existing networks is a big plus.
- Meryn Stol

Matthew, huh? I think the first goal is to build something very much technological the same as FriendFeed. Federation is the next step. But peer to peer is not even on the agenda (at least for the openff project as I know it). And as I said, I don't particularly like that roadmap. It does not really excite me.
- Meryn Stol

Evan, I learned some interesting things about laconica from this thread and will be taking a closer look
- Jason Wehmhoener

As this is a community open federated project I suggest to use open source Jaikuengine with pubsubhubbub running on Google Appengine. Reasons: Dealing with scalability(twitter has Big DDOS issues) Google infrastructure is the best, Real time push and pull based on pubsubhubbub (community hub is available). Jaiku threaded conversation is cool.It has Channels too. Regarding Macro (not...
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- Srini Vemula

You don't need to adapt laconica to that when NoseRub is so much close to what Friendfeed is. Actually, there are only a couple of features left in NoseRub to be a friendfeed clone (feature-wise, not presentation-wise). A running service using NoseRub is Identoo.com (Identoo is to NoseRub what identica is to laconica)
- Marcos Marado

Marcos, does Noserub have some kind of plugin and/or theme architecture so that changes to Noserub can be made without coordinating those changes with the core Noserub development team? I ask because when I look at indentoo.com it doesn't look/work much like Friendfeed, so it's possible the Noserub team has different goals. However, if Noserub supports plugins and/or themes it's possible that different goals can be supported without any issue.
- Jason Wehmhoener

If somebody wants to build plug-ins for Laconi.ca that make it more FriendFeed-like, or join the NoseRub project and add more FriendFeed-like functionality to that system, or just work on other projects that connect FriendFeed proper with Laconi.ca with NoseRub instances, I say more power to them. My impression to date has been that all that's distinct from the OpenFF effort, the intent of which is to build an OSS "clone" of FriendFeed as a new and separate project and code base.
- Ken Sheppardson

Matthew: The kind of distributed messaging that would be ideal for OpenFF is exactly what OpenMicroBlogging (now OStatus) provides. Users on different domains may subscribe and reply and each other, even on entirely separate server instances.
- Mike Chelen

Evan: Where are lists in StatusNet/Laconica? Never seen how they can be used.
- Mike Chelen

"There's been a lot of buzz lately about Diaspora, with its being called "the new Facebook alternative" and getting treated like some sort of social networking Holy Grail for privacy. It even set a record for start-up fundraising site Kickstarter by raising over $170,000 in pledges. Everyone seems pretty excited about the prospect of some magical new social network that will be private, secure, and "owned" by the users instead of evil corporate monsters. And who wouldn't be? I mean, it sounds great in principle, but with all of the excitement stirred up over the last week, nobody's bothered to talk about the harsh reality that it's all nothing more than a pipe dream."
- Kol Tregaskes
from Bookmarklet

An 'open version of x' will never be better than 'We're gonna take x and make it so much better'. They shouldn't make the open Facebook, they need to do to Facebook what Facebook did to Myspace
- Johnny
from iPhone

"I was at the MongoSF conference few weeks ago, and 10gen just hosted one at NY as well. In spite of See full size imageblogging about it, because its a NoSQL/cloud thingy, I was taken aback by the simplicity and the hope MongoDB provides. I’ll have a more detailed post about what I think about it in a few days, but until then chew on these slides from bit.ly who also uses it to power its backend datastore."
- imabonehead
from Bookmarklet

"Jay Kreps talks about the open source data store Project Voldemort. Voldemort is a distributed key-value store used by LinkedIn and other high-traffic web sites to overcome the inherent scalability limitations of a relational database. The conversation delves into the workings of a Voldemort cluster, the type of consistency guarantees that can be made in a distributed database, and the tradeoff between client and the server."
- imabonehead
from Bookmarklet

"In news that will surely make our own Rikki Kite very happy, a pair of open source Web applications have been created to fight back against Facebook's recent redefinition of privacy. ReclaimPrivacy.org allows for simple, quick identification of where your Facebook account exposes or shares your personal information to the Internet at large."
- imabonehead
from Bookmarklet